Saturday, September 1, 2012

Hard Choices

One of the messages that has come from this week's GOP Convention is that Republicans are willing to make hard choices while Democrats aren't.

I find that puzzling as there has been little evidence that Republicans in Congress have been willing to make hard choices about the federal budget. Locked into a no new taxes ideology, many in the GOP are unwilling to see that one of the hard choices that must be made is to raise taxes. Budget cuts will not be enough to eliminate the deficit, and the trickle down theory that low tax rates for the rich will magically revive the economy and raise federal revenues is just a theory. What does work is making sure that middle and low income households have enough money to spend. Increased demand for goods and services creates jobs. A million dollars in the wallet of one person does not create as much demand as one thousand dollars in the wallets of one thousand working people.

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Daniel Weir

The Thin Tradition

The opinions expressed in this Blog - which was originally called The Gospel in ToyTown - are solely those of the author. You are free to reproduce or link to another site anything that I post here. Please let me know if you do that and please acknowledge this blog as the source of reproduced material.

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About Me

After nearly 22 years in Western New York, I retired on June 30, 2010 and moved "back home" to Massachusetts, to Danvers. Six years later we moved to the Mount Washington Valley, where we met in 1971 and got married in 1972. Six For the eight and a half years prior to retiring, I served as the Rector of Saint Matthias Church, the Episcopal Parish in East Aurora in the Diocese of Western New York. Since my ordination in 1972, I have served as the Assistant Chaplain at Balliol College, Oxford; as a parish priest in Western Massachusetts and Western New York; as a member of the diocesan staff in Western New York; as the Director of the Erie County Commission on Homelessness (now the Homeless Alliance of Western New York); and as a religion teacher at Cardinal O'Hara High School.